Abstract

NHD Stewardship in Alaska: A Regionalized Approach
Track: Water Resources
Authors: Erik Johnson

A regionalized approach has been established for collaborative stewardship of the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) by state, federal, and university partners in Alaska. NHD 'staging geodatabases,' built on a simplified hydrography data model and tailored to meet local business requirements, have been deployed for southeast and south-central Alaska. The geodatabases are located in an ArcSDE instance housed at the University of Alaska Southeast (UAS). Agency partners collaboratively edit and update fisheries information along with stream, shoreline, glacier, and other features by utilizing SDE replication to synchronize changes between agency-hosted child geodatabases and the parent at UAS. A map service hosted by UAS allows partner agencies to coordinate on areas checked-out by agency editors; thus limiting reconciliation issues. UAS personnel, as a service to agency partners, updates the NHD from features contained within the staging geodatabases using a combination of Esri-developed models and USGS NHD tools.